Chris Silver Smith was up first, and he starts with a bang by telling the audience to get a jump start on a new twitter account by buying Twitter followers. Followers are low quality, but you get 1000 followers for only $47 through BoostTwitterFollowers.com.

He then says you can develop more followers rapidly by following those people who auto-follow back. Some of the tools he uses are SocialOomph to return followers easily and Twellow to see which of the people he follows also follow him back. He also suggests searching twitter to find similar Twitter users, particularly those who follow and engage with people on Twitter, as well as searching for topic areas to find out those who are tweeting in that particular market area.

He says it is important to not just merely broadcast. Retweet generously, look frequently for those with similar twitter accounts and topics to follow, post news of interest to your followers. Make sure you are curating content your followers will find interesting, as well as posting tweets that are likely to get retweeted.

Chris also uses tools which automate the process and make best use of timing for maximum impact tweets. He uses SocialOomph to schedule future tweets, Timely by Demand Force which will determine the best time slots for your tweets, after analyzing your previous 199 tweets. Dlvr.it is another tool he uses which organizes distribution across multiple social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

He suggests looking at ways to segment your accounts to reach all your audience. He brings up Weather Underground, and how they created multiple weather accounts for specific cities and geographical location, since most people in San Jose likely would not be interested in following weather updates from Miami.

He also touches on developing things like widgets which can gain popularity and in turn drive links and retweets. And he talks about how “daily quote” type feeds can get a high number of followers, but you need to determine how you can also market your site with it.

Next up is Carrie Gouldin from ThinkGeek, which was probably the best presentation I have seen at the conference so far this week. She came with a ton of data and metrics for how ThinkGeek approaches Twitter for marketing.

ThinkGeek uses the approach storytelling vs spam, with their focus on best customers/followers. They have decided that if they follow you, they already like you, so they use Twitter as a platform to build community and trust rather than strictly a marketing sales. They also created two Twitter streams – a main one, which is also used for customer service, and a spam one that is strictly product promotion.

ThinkGeek focuses on engagement and things that are interesting and likely to be retweeted… they had 140,000 retweets in 3 month period.

When looking at their ROI, they measure retweets, mentions and replies with cotweet; link clicks using bitly; image views using twitpic; then analytics for site visits and conversion.

She brings up a very interesting metric, that 81% of users follow less than 100 people.

Thinkgeek tweets once per hour, and they determined their peak hours are between 12-2pm EST, so they tailor content around those times. 50% of thinkgeeks retweets happen between 9am-1pm EST.

She looks at Thinkgeek’s top 10 retweets and discovered the following: 113 average character length, which gives room for people to add an editorial comment to the retweet. 7 were text only tweets. Day and time was significant with 7 tweeted betwen 9am-12 es. Only 3 links were not tied to the specific date. And finally, 2 were skynet jokes

Test a tweet at two different times of day, when does it get the most clicks/retweets. Try tweeting photos with twitpic and attribution rather than a link. Also try different kinds of content – text only, images, video, etc

When linking to a video, particularly if it is a long one and the funny part is in the last 30 seconds, link directly to good part.

Consider dressing up your icon for different events – ThinkGeek has a ton of different monkey icons dressed up differently for various events.

It is important not to go overboard on hashtags.

Next up is Zagg.com

Consider doing discounts and offers with an end time, such as “invalid after 20 uses” or ”offer ends soon”

Zagg did giveaways and giftcards, once per week, with things like ”guess the typing speed”.

Zagg looked at what they tweeted, and it breaks down:

Segmented content: blogs 74%, offers 7%, zagg news 14%, giveaway 4%

But the interesring thing is when they looked at what drove the actual revenue: blog 56%, offers 29%, zagg news 7%, giveaways 8%

They did a Black Friday promotion where they were giving away an ipad an hour. People woulod get an entry for submitting email address, then also got entries for sharing on Twitter and on Facebook. They changed what was shared every hour so it wasn’t always the same thing, and it enabled them to drive traffic to various parts of the site. They also were able to to expose different products to people. The end result? 585,000 visits to Zagg; 114% increase in revenue from previous Black Friday; Twitter was #2 referrer (Facebook #1), bringing in 11% of referrals. They also made trending topics in various locations. Also interesting is that their Klout score jumped from 55 to 77 in a day

From the Q&A

Zagg set up @zaggchick who responds to all customer service issues sent to main @zagg acct.

Carrie from ThinkGeek does 30% of her time on Twitter, spending about 3 hours per day. They never auto tweet but tweet content as it happens online. She tweets between 9am-7pm only. They dont tweet at odd hours, she turns off twitter when leaves work. She doesnt have a personal twitter acct, which I found interesting.

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Zagg is very ROI oriented and use Google Analytics to track Twitter conversions.

A Facebook fan is more valuable than a Twitter follower. And Carrie from ThinkGeek says not as much time spent on customer service on Facebook compared to Twitter. sThey also see a lot of inbound traffic from Facebook comment system used on the site.